Getting the GHC Sources

There are two ways to get sources to GHC: download a source distribution, or get the sources directly from our repository using ​darcs.

Source distributions

A source distribution is a file like ghc-6.12.2-src.tar.bz2, which contains a complete snapshot of the source tree for a particular version of GHC. Source distributions for all versions of GHC are available from the download page.

In addition to fixed releases of GHC, source distributions are also made each night from the current source repository, for both the HEAD and STABLE branches. To download these snapshots, head over to the download page.

Source distributions are easier to build, because we also include the output from running certain external tools like ​Happy, so you don't need to install these tools. See Building/Preparation for details.

Getting a GHC repository using darcs

A source tree consists of more than one repository: at the top level there is the main GHC repository, and certain subdirectories contain separate darcs repositories (the full list of darcs repositories relating to GHC is at DarcsRepositories). To get a complete repository tree using darcs:

Note that we use the --lazy flag: this tells darcs not to download the entire repository history, which can take rather a long time, but to download it on demand if you later use a darcs command that needs access to the history, such as darcs changes. The darcs-all script adds the --lazy flag by default when getting the other repositories.

Darcs has a sophisticated system of caching, which means that if you have already downloaded a GHC repository in the past, then most of the contents will probably be cached locally, so darcs won't have to download so much. Furthermore, all the history and content will be shared with your other local repositories, saving disk space.

Making a local branch

Branches in darcs are just separate repositories, although internally they share most of their files so are cheap to make. Once you have a local GHC repository, branching it is easy: just

$ darcs get --lazy ~/ghc ~/ghc-branch

where ~/ghc is the repository you want to branch and ~/ghc-branch is where you want to put the branch. Then use darcs-all as before to branch the rest of the repositories. You can then use darcs-all -r <path> to push and pull patches between your two local repository trees.

Getting a branch

The above instructions will get the HEAD - the main trunk of GHC development. There are also branches, from which stable releases are made. The active branches are listed on DarcsRepositories.

To get a branch, add the branch name after ​http://darcs.haskell.org/. For example, to get the ghc-6.12 branch, you would first say

$ darcs get --lazy http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc-6.12/ghc

and then use darcs-all as above to get the rest of the respositories.

Pulling new patches

The darcs-all script makes it easy to pull new patches. For example, darcs-all pull -a will pull all new patches from the original repository into the repository tree in the current directory.

Getting a complete repository tarball

Sometimes it's easier to download the entire set of repositories, complete with history, as a tarball and unpack it onto your system. These bundles are on ​http://darcs.haskell.org/ usually in three files of the form

ghc-HEAD-2007-08-29-ghc-corelibs-testsuite.tar.bz2 (100Mbytes)

ghc-HEAD-2007-08-29-ghc-corelibs.tar.bz2 (90 Mbytes)

ghc-HEAD-2007-08-29-ghc.tar.bz2 (60 Mbytes)

Each of these is a subset of the previous one; pick the smallest one that has what you need. Of course, the dates may vary.

Here's how to use the bundles:

Unpack the bundle, which will create a directory called ghc. You can rename this directory freely. 0. Change into the new directory, and pull patches from the main GHC repository:

$ cd ghc
$ darcs pull -a

Some core libraries might have been added to HEAD which were not in the last tarball. This means that after doing the last pull (which updates the list of core libraries) we need to do this to get any new libraries:

$ chmod +x darcs-all
$ ./darcs-all get

Now use the darcs-all script to pull patches from all the library repositories that came in the tarball, and the testsuite repository:

$ ./darcs-all pull -a

The command darcs-all automates the fetching of the repositories for the libraries.

If you omit step (3), then darcs-all will pull patches into the GHC repository too. If one of those patches modifies the darcs-all script itself, then bizarre things can happen (or at least: in the past, they could happen.) The safe thing to do is to get your main ghc repo up to date (step 3) and then run the script.

If you see any of the following error messages on Windows (the filename varies)